WASHINGTON  Success is ephemeral, failure is inevitable and woe to those who don't bow before the fickle movie gods.

That is the collective wisdom shared by a who's who of Hollywood insiders, from stars (Jodie Foster, George Clooney) to studio bigwigs (20th Century Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman, ex-Paramount chief Sherry Lansing) in the HBO documentary Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs & Blockbusters, premiering June 29 (9 ET/PT).

The special honors the 100th anniversary of showbiz bible Variety and is inspired by editor in chief Peter Bart's just-published Boffo! How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb. But while the book focuses on against-the-odds triumphs, the film is most revealing, and relevant, when it comes to fiascoes.

"Getting Hollywood types to talk about their flops is challenging," says Bill Couturie, the director of Boffo! "That's not in their DNA."

Though Morgan Freeman openly chats about Driving Miss Daisy and The Shawshank Redemption, he squirms when the topic turns to the 1990 dud The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which he played a supporting role as a judge. "Here's this Academy Award winner talking about a movie that's more than 15 years old," Couturie says, "and it's still a raw wound."

No moment is as rich with irony, though, as when actor Richard Dreyfuss, who also recounts how Jaws was nearly capsized by its erratic rubber shark, bemoans how screenplays have become secondary to special effects: "The problem is they don't know what stories to tell with this new technology."

Splattered with fake blood and dirt, Dreyfuss makes his point while shooting this year's Poseidon, the $160 million dead-in-the-water remake of the 1972 cruise-ship disaster yarn The Poseidon Adventure. "It's the first real failure of the summer," Bart says. "And there is Richard Dreyfuss in his makeup, talking around the issue. He could have said, 'Here I am right from the set of Poseidon. My part sucks.' "

Movies such as Bonfire, pegged as a certain hit with a story based on Tom Wolfe's literary sensation, show how expectations can prove false. Take last summer's Cinderella Man and this year's The Da Vinci Code, both directed by Ron Howard and produced by Brian Grazer.

"In Brian's mind, Cinderella Man was a shocking failure," Bart says of the well-reviewed boxing biopic headlined by Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger. It went down with a count of just $61 million at the box office.

"I talked to Penny Marshall about that," Couturie says of the director of A League of Their Own who helped produce Cinderella Man. "Brian wouldn't say anything negative about Universal's release date. But Penny was much more frank. 'It was a brown movie,' she said. 'You can't release a brown movie in the summertime. Brown movies are for fall.' She was right."

Then there is The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown's controversial best seller. Along with protests from religious groups, there were damning reviews and criticism of casting Tom Hanks as a dashing professor. None of that mattered. Fans of the book flocked to the movie, which is about to cross the $200 million box-office line.

"It's the most famous novel of its epoch," Bart says. "It reminded me of Birth of a Nation," D.W. Griffith's silent 1915 Civil War epic, one of the most profitable movies of its day, that depicted heroic Ku Klux Klansmen. "Both films were based on very popular books that had a very provocative thesis."

And what to make of The Break-Up, the summer's runaway comic success starring real-life couple Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston? Despite brutal reviews and a misleading ad campaign that sold the fractious tale as an uproarious Wedding Crashers-style romp, it opened at nearly $40 million and should reach at least $100 million.